ORIGINS

The origin of the sambenito can be traced to the biblical Fall of Man. Or so, at least, explained the Spanish Inquisitor of Sicily, Luis de Páramo, in his influential De origine et progressu oficii Sanctae Inquisitionis (On the origin and progress of the office of the Holy Inquisition, Madrid, 1598). Genesis 3 recounts that after Adam and Eve had committed the original sin, God cursed them to a life of hard labor and painful childbirth. Just before expelling them from the Garden of Eden, God created “garments of skin” that Adam and Eve were to wear. For Páramo, these skin garments were not intended to simply cover their bodies but, rather, to inflict a lasting disgrace on their persons.Footnote ¹⁰ As such, they set a precedent for the sambenitos used by the early modern Spanish Inquisition. The skin garments imposed on Adam and Eve were not the only ancient precedent invoked as an authoritative model for the sambenitos. Francisco Peña (ca. 1540–1612), a Spanish Inquisitor best known for his commentary on the fourteenth-century inquisitorial manual the Directorium Inquisitorum, signaled other biblical models. For instance, he referred to the sackcloth King Ahab imposed on himself in atonement for having had Naboth killed so he could possess the victim's vineyard (1 Kings 21:27).Footnote ¹¹ The most common theory, however, was that the sambenito was derived from a penitential practice used in the primitive Christian church.Footnote ¹² This practice involved requiring those performing public penance to wear a sackcloth garment that had been blessed by a bishop or a priest—this garment became known as the “blessed sackcloth” (saccus benedictus). After the penitents had finished the designated period during which they were supposed to wear this penitential dress, they were absolved of their sins and readmitted into the fold of the church.

The sackcloth has a long history as an artifact of Christian penitence. Sackcloths and cilices, or haircloth garments (cilicium), were commonly worn to perform self-imposed penance in late antiquity, and the practice continued among certain religious orders into modernity.Footnote ¹³ The primitive Christian church instituted rituals of public penance in which sinners wore sackcloths and appeared before the bishops at church doors to signal their humility and repentance. Generally, these public rituals had fallen into disuse by the early Middle Ages, but they were revived within the context of later reforms.Footnote ¹⁴ In the ninth century, an attempt was made to restore the earlier canonical penance, although it was transformed into a ritual primarily concerned with offenses of a scandalous public nature.Footnote ¹⁵ The Episcopal and Papal Inquisitions, which began operating in the late twelfth century, adopted aspects of these earlier public rituals, integrating them into a system of discipline and punishment that included some innovations.Footnote ¹⁶ For example, the penitential garment imposed by the medieval Inquisition on heretics borrowed the common practice among pilgrims of wearing a cross. Thus, these garments became signs of both contrition and infamy.Footnote ¹⁷

As this brief overview clearly shows, the sambenito introduced by the Spanish Inquisition in the late fifteenth century drew on earlier forms of penitential garbs employed in rituals of public penance. Yet it would be mistaken to consider the early modern sambenito simply as a product of an unbroken tradition. Such a notion of continuity was promoted by the Inquisition as part of a legitimizing campaign. At the center of this theory was an etymology. Saccus benedictus, it was argued, was transformed through linguistic corruption into the Spanish and Portuguese sambenito. Therefore, in their quest to save souls from sin, the Iberian Inquisitions could claim that they merely followed an ancient Christian penitential tradition. This etymology, however, was refuted by the famed philologist Américo Castro, who showed that before it assumed its early modern inquisitorial meaning, the sambenito had a more neutral significance, as a sort of apron.Footnote ¹⁸ In his opinion, the sambenito was not derived from an obscure ancient Christian penitential practice of wearing episcopally blessed sacks but was instead simply linked to San Benito—that is, to the monastic order of Saint Benedict and, in particular, its monks’ practice of wearing shoulder-width scapulars over their habits. Castro's critical remark debunks the existence of a linear continuity between the primitive Christian church and the early modern Iberian Inquisitions. It also opens up the possibility of a further consideration, one undeveloped by Castro, of the apparent tension between the honorable name of Saint Benedict and the negative connotation of the habit imposed by Inquisitors.

Some early modern authors were well aware of this dissonance. The friar Antonio de Yepes, author of a history of the Order of Saint Benedict (published between 1609 and 1621), explicitly asked how an order so renowned and honored by popes, emperors, and kings could be so outrageously associated with the scapular worn by heretics.Footnote ¹⁹ Yepes entertained several theories that dealt with this seemingly unholy pairing. One theory came from the contemporary general of his own order, who argued that Saint Andrew's cross, a symbol of “Christian nobility and Old Christian ancestry,” was used to adorn the penitential habit imposed on heretics as a form of irony. Thus, “in the same way that we call a black man John White and we call ‘good women’ those that are very lost,” so is the “sack” the Inquisition imposed on the “ignoble and unclean” ironically called by the name of Saint Benedict, “father and patron of Spanish nobility.”Footnote ²⁰ Yepes considered this explanation, regardless of its authoritative provenance, to be rather thin, and outlined an alternative. Drawing on ecclesiastical legislation, he argued that at least since the early Middle Ages, Christians undergoing public penance wore monastic habits and undertook periods of confinement in monasteries. And since the Benedictine Order had set down roots all over Spain and across Europe, it became synonymous with this form of penance. Additionally, Yepes explained that it was a common custom to dub certain types of clothing according to their places of origin. Thus, for instance, tudescos are the capes worn by Germans, and saboyanas are the dresses worn by ladies in Savoy. In the same way, Yepes concluded, Spaniards employed the word sambenitos to refer to the scapulars used by the Benedictine monks and by those who performed public penance.Footnote ²¹

What Yepes described was a process of cultural diffusion through which the term sambenito expanded beyond a strictly monastic context to become a generic concept. His historical reconstruction was clearly written from the perspective of a chronicler of the Benedictine Order, yet it appears credible and was accepted by others during the early modern period.Footnote ²² Rather than suggesting a direct link—based on a dubious etymology—between the primitive church and the early modern Inquisition, Yepes's theory emphasized a slow process of borrowing and adaptation. The term sambenito thus refers primarily to the scapular that was initially associated with the Benedictines but that, over time, ceased to be exclusive to this monastic order. The Inquisition adopted its use but introduced significant changes to both its appearance and significance, as Yepes made sure to emphasize. It continued to imply penitence, but now also signified “ignominy and affront to all” and was considered a “sad and opprobrious insignia.”Footnote ²³

FROM RITUAL TO MEMORY

In its first life stages, the sambenito was a garment imposed as inquisitorial punishment in the context of the auto de fe.Footnote ²⁴ Over time, these sartorial sambenitos were joined by a new type of artifact that carried the same name. The new sambenito was an image more than a garment, as it was perpetually displayed in churches and convents. Instead of inflicting infamy on the bodies of the individuals condemned by the Inquisition, it did so on their public images and memories. Yet despite the fact that the new function of the sambenito was the most important novelty introduced by the Iberian Inquisitions there were relatively few explicit regulations for it. Compendia of inquisitorial rules addressed the function of these objects, but they offered no detailed discussion of their form. The material from which they were made, their shape, and their collective spatial arrangement often depended on pragmatic solutions and local customs. This led to some differences in the appearance of sambenitos across the Iberian world, although their function as signifiers of infamy remained essentially the same.

In the earliest iteration of this new function, the Inquisition hung the sambenito garments on church walls. The basic form of these garments evolved slowly and unevenly. In the Middle Ages, the Papal Inquisition used tunics adorned with two or three embroidered crosses as penitential garments.Footnote ²⁵ When the Iberian Inquisitions created the sambenitos, they adopted this format and developed it into a more complex form of punishment, conveying an entire system of meanings. However, their prescriptions for the format of the sambenitos focused almost entirely on the figure of the cross. In 1490, Torquemada ordered that reconciled penitents should wear a garment of black or gray cloth adorned with a red cross. Then, in 1514, the Inquisitor General, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (ca. 1436–1517), ordered that sambenitos should be adorned with the X-shaped Saint Andrew's cross, to avoid insulting the cross on which Christ died.Footnote ²⁶ Normally painted in red or orange on a light yellow background, Saint Andrew's cross became the established adornment of the sambenitos worn by the penitenciados and reconciliados—in other words, those who were sentenced to penitential, corporal, and pecuniary punishments but were eventually reintroduced into the Christian community. In some tribunals, those who committed relatively minor offenses (abjured de vehementi) would wear a sambenito adorned with half a cross instead.Footnote ²⁷ There was much greater flexibility when it came to adorning the sambenitos of the relajados, or those who were deemed irreconcilable, expelled indefinitely from the church and handed over to the secular authorities for execution. Their sambenitos, as well as the shaming conical hats (corozas) they wore, were adorned with elaborate depictions of flames, demons, and human figures, evoking the iconography of the Last Judgment and of hell while also alluding to their execution by fire.Footnote ²⁸ Such iconography was, to the best of our knowledge, never prescribed by a specific set of guidelines or visual norms but, rather, tacitly acknowledged by the Inquisition.Footnote ²⁹ The only exception was the sambenito created for those executed “in effigy”—that is, substituted at the auto with an image since they were absent or dead. In this case, inquisitorial prescriptive texts stipulated that the sambenito should display the “signs and figure of the condemned,” as well as an inscription stating their name.Footnote ³⁰

Though certain features of the sambenito remained constant across the Iberian world, there were also iconographic variations. In some cases, a more elaborate iconography was used to signal the degree of repentance of the condemned and, thus, the probability of their salvation. In Pedro Berruguete's Saint Dominic Presiding over an Auto de fe (1491–99), the sambenitos and corozas worn by the two condemned to the stake in the foreground are adorned with open mouths of hell exuding fire that engulfs what may be representations of their damned souls (fig. 2). These stand in contrast to the condemned, depicted in the left side of the scene as taking off his penitential cone. On that figure's cone, the flames are turning down, signaling the salvation of his soul. This motif, later known as fuego revolto, was widely used by the Portuguese Inquisitions. A Scottish Protestant who witnessed an auto de fe in Lisbon in 1682, described the sambenitos of the penitenciados as bearing “flames painted, with their Points turned downward, to signify them having been saved.” Those condemned to death as heretics, he wrote, wore sambenitos adorned with flames pointing upward. To this was added “their picture”—namely, their portrait—which was rendered “with Dogs, Serpents, and Devils, all with open Mouths painted about it.”Footnote ³¹ This system of signs was also used by the tribunal of Goa, as depicted in the renowned series of prints published in the 1688 Paris edition of Charles Dellon's Account of the Inquisition of Goa (fig. 3).Footnote ³²

Figure 2. Pedro Berruguete. Saint Dominic Presiding over an Auto de fe, 1491–99. © Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional del Prado.

Figure 3. Cornelis Martinus Vermeulen after Pierre Paul Sevin. A man that was exempted from fire thanks to his confession. In Charles Dellon, Relation de l'Inquisition de Goa (Paris: 1688), unnumbered sheet between pp. 294 and 295. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

The function of the sambenitos’ diverse iconographic details was to communicate information and to make the “penitents well known and manifest to the eyes of all, whether friends or foes.”Footnote ³³ In cities across the early modern Iberian world, individuals wearing sambenitos roamed through the streets, squares, and neighborhoods, as the late sixteenth-century View of Seville suggests (fig. 4).Footnote ³⁴ Public declaration of this nature undermined the social status of the individual in question, and its appropriateness as a punitive measure had been the subject of debate ever since the beginning of the Inquisition. Andrés Bernáldez, whose History of the Catholic Monarchs (1488) is a central source for the early days of the Spanish Inquisition, narrated how the victims of inquisitorial persecution sentenced to wear sambenitos were permitted to remove them, “so that the infamy would not extend across the land due to the sight of this.”Footnote ³⁵ This approach was soon to be discarded. In 1490, Torquemada instructed that those reconciled after trial should wear sambenitos for the rest of their lives.Footnote ³⁶ However, this regulation was later modified and the sambenito was imposed for a variety of sentence lengths, depending on the gravity of the crime. In some cases, it was worn only during the reading of the inquisitorial sentence at the auto de fe, while in other cases it was worn for several years, and even in perpetuity. Such modifications did not signify laxity. Inquisitorial legislation imposed significant penalties for those who dared to throw away or hide their sambenitos and declared that only the central inquisitorial authorities could commute this form of punishment.Footnote ³⁷

Figure 4. Attributed to Alonso Sánchez Coello. View of Seville, late sixteenth century. Detail. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photo by Cloe Cavero de Carondelet.

The imposition of the sambenito garment on individuals thus turned infamy into a common, embodied sight in Iberian cities. However, the Inquisition determined on extending this infamy beyond the period of punishment and hung the sambenitos in churches, transforming them into mnemonic monuments. While the precise origin of this practice remains obscure, it is clear that it began almost simultaneously with the establishment of the first tribunals of the Inquisition in Spain, in the 1480s. By the late fifteenth century, for instance, the traveler Hieronymous Münzer wrote that he saw “more than a thousand” sambenitos displayed in a chapel in Valencia.Footnote ³⁸ It was only in the sixteenth century, however, that the practice of displaying sambenitos was codified, legitimized, and regulated. Inquisitorial writs (cartas acordadas) concerning this matter were sent to the various tribunals as early as the first decades of the sixteenth century.Footnote ³⁹ Subsequently, it was addressed in regulations published by the Inquisitors General and widely disseminated across the Iberian world in numerous editions. The 1552 Regimento da Santa Inquisição (Regulations of the Holy Inquisition, hereafter referred to as Regulations), written by the Portuguese Inquisitor General Cardenal-Infante Henrique, ordered that after an auto de fe the Inquisitors should hang the sambenitos in cathedrals and monasteries, in places where they could be “seen by all.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The Spanish Co[m]pilacion de las Instrucciones del Officio de la Sancta Inquisicion (Compilation of the instructions of the Office of the Holy Inquisition, hereafter referred to as Instructions), published by the Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdés in 1561, went a step further by ordering Inquisitors not only to hang new sambenitos but to ensure that old sambenitos were renovated. Such actions were meant to guarantee that “the memory of the infamy of the heretics and their descendants will remain forever.”Footnote ⁴¹ Later inquisitorial tracts echoed this idea, stressing how the display of sambenitos served to “perpetuate infamy through these signs and monuments of impiety,” as well as to deter people from committing crimes through the “horrendous and dreadful spectacle of infamy.”Footnote ⁴²

The inquisitorial regulations sought to standardize a preexisting practice. The Spanish Instructions clearly acknowledged that the practice of hanging sambenitos was a patent and established reality and, as such, should continue unaltered.Footnote ⁴³ The Portuguese Regulations referred to the practice as customary, without citing an explicit legislative precedent.Footnote ⁴⁴ Both references suggest that this practice had evolved before becoming subject to regulation, when the Iberian Inquisitions underwent their major institutional reform and procedural standardization in the mid-sixteenth century. It was in the wake of this reform that the first legitimization of this practice was published. In his 1569 edition of De Catholicis institutionibus, Diego de Simancas, who had played a key role in drafting the 1561 Instructions, added a key section that was not present in the previous edition, which bore the slightly different title Institutiones Catholicae (1552). In this new section, Simancas argued that the biblical episode of Korah's sedition against the authority of Moses and Aaron (Numbers 16) provided the authoritative model for the display of sambenitos.Footnote ⁴⁵ The uprising ended with divine punishment for rebels, followed by Moses's order to Eleazar, the son of Aaron, to take the censers with which the rebels offered incense, hammer them into plaques, and affix them to the altar, as a sign for the Israelites not to challenge the priestly authority of the “seed of Aaron.” Like these plaques, Simancas argued, the sambenitos in churches were a public sign of inquisitorial authority, a deterrent, and a way to perpetuate the infamy of the condemned as well as their descendants.

While official regulations and tracts such as Simancas's made the display of sambenitos a central aspect of the Inquisition's punitory regime, these normative texts were laconic in practical terms. Little instruction was provided about where sambenitos should be hung or the particular way in which they should be organized, which led to considerable variety from one place to another.Footnote ⁴⁶ Inquisitors had to find spaces able to accommodate large numbers of sambenitos, while keeping them as visible and legible as possible. Typical choices were cathedral cloisters, but the interiors of cathedrals, collegiate churches, parish churches, and Dominican convents were also common. In terms of content, the Spanish Instructions ordered Inquisitors to ensure that the sambenitos on display included “the date of their condemnation and whether their crime was that of being Jews, Moors, or followers of Martin Luther and his new heresies.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Such concern for providing explanatory information was stressed even further in the Portuguese Regulations, which ordered that sambenitos should be displayed on a wall with a panel beneath them listing the names of the reconciliados and relajados to whom they belonged, so that “anyone could read them.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Neither document, however, provided guidelines concerning iconography.

An analysis of the two groups of extant sambenitos previously hung in Iberian churches reveals their dependency on the symbolic language of the sambenito garment yet also the particular problems of conservation they posed. The first group comprises fourteen sambenitos originally displayed in the cathedral of Tui in Galicia, near the border with Portugal. It consists of five pieces of canvas mounted on wooden frames, each of which displays two, three, or four sambenitos, painted in oil. All are adorned with Saint Andrew's cross and informative inscriptions, and two are accompanied by portrayals of the condemned (figs. 5 and 6). The inscriptions refer to trials against Judaizers in the 1610s, but, as we explain below, they were remade in the eighteenth century after a robbery. In fact, what visitors in Tui see today is an even more recent artifact. When these sambenitos were found in the cathedral's archive in 1987, most of their inscriptions were illegible and much of the painting had faded away.Footnote ⁴⁹ Efforts to restore the sambenitos’ original appearance have involved aggressive conservational interventions. A large part of the inscription we see today in the sambenito of Antonia Henriquez, for instance, has been retrieved from archival sources, while her effigy is the product of the restorers’ imaginations (fig. 6).Footnote ⁵⁰ A second and practically unknown group of extant sambenitos is housed in the parish church of the small Castilian village of Coruña del Conde. It consists of six sambenitos dated between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (fig. 7).Footnote ⁵¹ There are good reasons to consider the present form of these pieces as a result of much later interventive conservation. Information on their history is lacking, yet a visual examination reveals that the sambenitos have been reframed and heavily repainted. This is most evident in the inscription recording a “Lutheran heretic” condemned in 1509—almost ten years before Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg!

Figure 5. Sambenitos of Andrés Duarte (sentenced in 1619) and Antonia Gómez, eighteenth century or later. 146 x 71 cm. Museo Diocesano, Tui. Courtesy of Suso Vila.

Figure 6. Sambenitos of Antonia Saravia (sentenced in 1617) and Antonia Henriquez (sentenced in 1619), eighteenth century or later. 150 x 72 cm. Museo Diocesano, Tui. Courtesy of Suso Vila.

Figure 7. Sambenitos of Juan Cirujano, Alonso de Soria, Andrés Alonso, Constanza Martínez, María la Navarra, and Pedro Núñez de Santa Fe (sentenced between 1490–1509), eighteenth century or later. 68.5 x 326.3 cm. Church of San Martín, Coruña del Conde. Photo by Cloe Cavero de Carondelet.

Despite these evidently modern interventions, some general points can be made about the intended symbolism of the displayed sambenitos. In terms of iconography, these sambenitos demonstrate an attempt at simplification, intended to facilitate the viewer's identification of the condemned's sins. In Coruña del Conde, the sambenito of a man condemned for Judaizing in 1490 displayed nothing more than the head of what seems to be a dog, a wolf, or a dragon, all symbols of evil commonly associated with heresy (fig. 7).Footnote ⁵² Visual and textual evidence of other displayed sambenitos that are no longer extant shows similar attempts to simplify the iconography. In Córdoba, displayed sambenitos of the relajados were signaled straightforwardly with red and orange flames (fig. 10). The sambenitos of the relajados in Goa and Tui (in person and in effigy, respectively) displayed portraits of the condemned burning in flames (for Tui, see figs. 5 and 6).Footnote ⁵³

Other sambenitos, however, exhibited a range of iconographies and remarkably elaborate scenes, despite their relatively small size and the paramount importance of legibility. The Dominican convent in Barcelona, whose cloisters displayed more than five hundred sambenitos, provides a good example. The English traveler Joseph Townsend, who visited the convent in the late eighteenth century, was “so much struck with the fantastic forms which the painters had given to their daemons and the strange attitudes of the heretics” that he decided to sketch some of them and print them in his book A journey through Spain (London, 1792) (fig. 8).Footnote ⁵⁴ In this composition, the central motif is a demon embracing and starting to gobble the heretic's naked soul while both are surrounded by flames. Above this scene are two more representations of demons eating men's souls, surely taken from other sambenitos displayed in the cloister. Townsend's sketches are an extraordinary piece of evidence of the largely lost figurative culture of infamy that pervaded Iberian churches for more than three centuries.

Figure 8. Sketch of sambenitos from the Dominican convent of Barcelona. In Joseph Townsend, A journey through Spain (London: 1792), vol. 1, unnumbered sheet between pp. 120 and 121. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.

Inquisition tribunals regularly relied on painters and other artisans to assist with the production and subsequent conservation of sambenitos.Footnote ⁵⁵ The selection of painters for this task, it seems, varied greatly, as did the fees paid for their work.Footnote ⁵⁶ Some tribunals chose painters of high social and artistic status. Antonio Vázquez (ca. 1485–1563) and Pedro Díaz Minaya (ca. 1555–1624), who painted dozens of sambenitos for both autos de fe and church walls, are a case in point; they were recognized artists in Valladolid as well as familiares of the Holy Office.Footnote ⁵⁷ Other tribunals relied on less renowned artists for their patronage. This was the case with Francisco Oliver, a “painter of ymagineria and of the Holy Office of this city” who restored the sambenitos in the cathedral of Córdoba in the early seventeenth century.Footnote ⁵⁸ In New Spain, according to one testimony, Indigenous painters were specifically selected to paint and restore sambenitos for the cathedral of Mexico.Footnote ⁵⁹ Such a variety of artistic profiles indicates that each tribunal was free to hire the painters best suited to its needs and economic constraints.

The crucial role of painters and artisans in making and maintaining the sambenitos brings to light the central issue with which Inquisitors had to contend in keeping the memory of infamy alive. Made from sackcloth, sambenito garments were fragile. When hung on the walls of a damp church or in an open-air cathedral cloister, they were exposed to mold, dust, insects, sunlight, wind, and rain. Over time, the inscriptions would have become illegible and the fabric would have progressively deteriorated. To ensure that the sambenitos effectively commemorated their wearers’ infamy, Inquisitors had to introduce practices of conservation, restoration, and substitution, which, in turn, implied constant adjustment and reorganization measures. Despite its intended function as a fixed monument of memory, the sambenito became an object under constant transmutation.

The need to regularly mend and replace degraded sambenitos led Inquisitors to develop a series of material innovations aimed at improving their durability as well as the legibility of the names and crimes of the condemned. Instead of replicating each sackcloth garment, they devised more functional arrangements. One frequently employed strategy was to replace the original garments with large pieces of canvas. Sometimes referred to as curtains (cortinas) or, especially during the eighteenth century, as blankets (mantetas), these pieces of cloth displayed dozens of sambenitos organized into rows.Footnote ⁶⁰ On some occasions, the canvases were even framed with wood.Footnote ⁶¹ Churches and monasteries usually displayed several of these curtains, each of which grouped together the sambenitos used for a specific type of condemnation.Footnote ⁶² The sambenitos themselves appear to have varied widely in size. In one of the few instances in which concrete measurements are given, they were about 40 cm long and 30 cm wide.Footnote ⁶³ In contrast, a 1613 sketch of a curtain in the old cathedral of Valencia suggests that they were much larger (fig. 9).Footnote ⁶⁴

Figure 9. Sketch of the sambenitos displayed in the old cathedral of Valencia, 1613. Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte. Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Inquisición, libro 919, fol. 850^r.

Using curtains made it possible to accommodate ever-increasing numbers of sambenitos in an efficient way. Year after year, auto de fe after auto de fe, the Inquisition filled the walls of Iberian churches and convents with sambenitos. By the late sixteenth century, even a small parish church such as that of Fregenal (Badajoz) displayed 599 sambenitos. Numbers were significantly higher in major cities. The cloisters of the cathedral of Córdoba exhibited around 4,000 sambenitos at the turn of the seventeenth century (fig. 10). The tribunal of Seville reported that its cathedral housed between 6,000 and 7,000 sambenitos in the late eighteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁵ Given this volume, the renovation of sambenitos was often a laborious operation. For instance, the tribunal of the Canary Islands ordered that 212 sambenitos hanging in the cathedral of Las Palmas were to be remade in 1660.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1667, the tribunal of New Spain hung 400 new sambenitos in the cathedral of Mexico, half of them replacing old, deteriorated ones, while the other half corresponded to recent condemnations.Footnote ⁶⁷ Throughout the early modern period, the Inquisition carefully crafted strategies to produce and maintain sambenitos, effectively creating archives of infamy. Displayed on the walls of churches and convents, rows and rows of sambenitos provided a visual register that propagated the memory of those who had been condemned for crimes against the faith.

Figure 10. Reconstruction of the sambenitos as they were displayed in the cloisters of the cathedral of Córdoba ca. 1620. © Matilde Grimaldi and the authors.

THE VISUAL ARCHIVE OF INFAMY: USES AND ABUSES

The function of sambenitos as archival registers was intrinsically related to the discriminatory concept of purity of blood. Purity of blood was defined by both lineage and orthodoxy: in order to be considered pure, an individual had to be “untainted” by Jewish or Muslim ancestry and also had to demonstrate that no family member had been convicted by the Inquisition. Official certificates were required for admission into corporations and posts that were regulated by purity-of-blood statutes. These documents were the result of institutional inquiries—inquisitorial or otherwise—that sought to verify that a candidate's background was free from any trace of heresy or “tainted” blood.Footnote ⁶⁸ In this context, the fact that sambenitos were displayed publicly made them a key site of collective memory. Because they provided a visual record of lineage, institutions considered them to be a form of proof. The open nature of these archives stood in stark contrast to the Inquisition archive (referred to as el secreto), which was hidden from the public eye. As a public archive, however, sambenitos were exposed to the risk of unlicensed removal by those who suffered from being associated with infamy, in addition to being subject to damage by nature. The visual archive of infamy thus served as a resource for collective memory and legal discrimination but was also a target for discontent, criticism, and abuse.

The mnemonic and legal use of sambenitos is clearly illustrated by the case of Juan Rubio de Herrera, a Spaniard of allegedly New Christian origins. Rubio de Herrera's quest for social ascendency was halted by the presence of sambenitos. Born in Córdoba in 1579, he began working as an agent of the Spanish Crown in Rome in 1604. This position required him to carry out a variety of political and artistic commissions, and he kept it until his death, in 1641.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, being an agent was not enough for Rubio de Herrera—he aspired to secure an ecclesiastical position in Spain. In 1619, his efforts bore fruit. In August of that year, Pope Paul V granted him a position of medio racionero in the cathedral of Córdoba.Footnote ⁷⁰ A medio racionero was a low-ranking member of a cathedral chapter who had no right to vote in the chapter's assemblies. Such a position, in other words, had relatively little authority but carried with it a number of benefits, including a secure income. Perhaps even more importantly, the position of medio racionero was associated with the status of an Old Christian, as it was known that a requisite for joining the cathedral chapter was holding an untainted lineage. This precondition was established in the purity-of-blood statutes decreed in the cathedral of Córdoba in 1530 and authorized by Pope Paul III.Footnote ⁷¹

Rubio de Herrera was well aware of this requirement and granted power of attorney to his brother and brother-in-law to present the papal bull in Córdoba and, if necessary, to swear that he was a baptized Christian, “clean of any bad race of Moor, Jew, or any other Pagan newly converted to our holy Catholic faith.”Footnote ⁷² His declaration was by no means sufficient. Córdoba's cathedral, like other institutions regulated by purity-of-blood statutes, required an official investigation of candidates seeking positions in the chapter. A prolonged investigation then began, during which public opinion and visual evidence frequently intertwined. First, witnesses were asked for their opinions about Rubio de Herrera's identity and his and his family's reputation—what was known during the period as the “public voice.”Footnote ⁷³ Some signaled the existence of various sambenitos as incriminating proof of Rubio de Herrera's tainted lineage. For instance, Diego López Maldonado, a seventy-year-old presbyter of the church of San Andrés, declared that he considered Rubio de Herrera and his family to be “unclean confesos,” as this was a common opinion of them in the city. He added that he also held this opinion because he knew of several sambenitos hung in the cathedral's cloisters that recorded the crimes of his ancestors. Maldonado explained that about thirty years ago, several old and well-regarded individuals showed him a sambenito in the cloisters’ west gallery and told him that it belonged to Rubio de Herrera's great-great-grandfather, who was burned by the Inquisition. He further noted that Rubio de Herrera was “descended from yet another sambenito” placed in the north gallery.Footnote ⁷⁴

Maldonado's testimony demonstrates the extent to which sambenitos were the subject of conversation and were used as aide-mémoires. The information they contained and the oral circulation of that information played a powerful role in creating and sustaining public opinion about “impure” lineages. This “public voice” was deemed a fundamental form of proof in purity-of-blood investigations. At the same time, however, the sambenitos stood in their own right as an important form of visual testimony, and the judges conducting the inquiries did not overlook them. In the case of Rubio de Herrera, they summoned Francisco Oliver, a painter in the service of the Inquisition who had been responsible for the most recent renovation of the sambenitos in the cathedral's cloister. Oliver regarded Rubio de Herrera and his family to be confesos, because he had been told this and also because he had renovated the sambenitos belonging to Rubio de Herrera's ancestors. He underscored that his physical contact with these sambenitos, “through his hands,” rendered his knowledge about Rubio de Herrera's tainted ancestry unquestionable.Footnote ⁷⁵ The testimonies of Maldonado and Oliver joined six other testimonies in discussing in detail the existence of sambenitos related to Rubio de Herrera. These eight testimonies were a small group within the total of sixty-five witnesses, but the specific evidence they referred to had to be taken into account. In contrast to the persuasive yet immaterial nature of public opinion, the sambenitos constituted hard evidence that could be physically verified or refuted. Indeed, the cathedral's chapter did just that, and undertook an “inspection by eyesight” (“por vista de ojos”) of the sambenitos.Footnote ⁷⁶

The practice of inspection by eyesight was an established legal procedure since at least the thirteenth century; it aimed to verify certain types of evidence presented to a court through an ocular examination conducted by a judge.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the case of Rubio de Herrera, this ocular examination was conducted in September 1620, when two clergymen from the cathedral chapter, accompanied by a notary, went to the cloister to inspect the sambenitos in question. As they subsequently reported, the west gallery had many curtains of sambenitos, which were hung from the top of the wall in six rows and had black lines separating each sambenito from the next (fig. 10). The delegation paid particular attention to four sambenitos hung in the west gallery, one in the north gallery, and another in the east gallery. These six sambenitos, corresponding to individuals allegedly related to Rubio de Herrera, originated from the period of 1486–1504, a period known for the Inquisition's intense repression of Judaizers. They thus maintained the memory of crimes of heresy committed almost a century and a half before the investigation into Rubio de Herrera's purity of blood. The delegation made note of each sambenito's precise location on the wall by signaling its row and column.

Having seen the six sambenitos and indicated their precise location, the two clergymen gave orders for them to be copied by the painter Agustín de Borja. The degree of similitude between the originals and Borja's copies is impossible to ascertain, but it is clear that the painter adjusted the sambenitos’ proportions (width: media vara, height: tercia vara) to those of an ordinary folio (fig. 11).Footnote ⁷⁸ Each painting, which included all the main details of the inscription and the corresponding image, had a heading indicating its precise location and was certified by the notary and the two clergymen on its reverse side. The paintings were conceived as legal evidence, visually substantiating the act of ocular witnessing and granting it an empirical authority.

Figure 11. Agustín de Borja. Sambenito of Juan González Rubio (sentenced in 1486), 1620. Archivo Capitular de la Catedral, Córdoba, 5578, cuadernillo 5, fol. 154^r.

While Rubio de Herrera's legal representative was summoned to attend the ocular inspection, he failed to show up. Rubio de Herrera used this as a pretext to challenge the validity of the inspection and to demand a new examination. The result was a series of further delays until, eventually, another round of inspections was conducted in 1625, almost six years after the beginning of the original investigation. The 1625 investigation revolved almost entirely around the power—but also the limitations—of the sambenito as a form of legal evidence. The investigators began by attempting to establish the existence of a tradition of displaying sambenitos in Córdoba. They then asked the witnesses if they were aware that the Inquisition was obligated to renovate sambenitos when “they became old, torn, or faded.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The interrogators continued with more specific inquiries concerning the six sambenitos related to Rubio de Herrera, trying to verify whether or not the names inscribed on them belonged to Herrera's relatives. Finally, questions were asked about sambenitos belonging to members of the cathedral chapter who had been accused of Judaizing in the early years of inquisitorial activity in Córdoba. These individuals had no relation whatsoever to Rubio de Herrera, but they were included in the interrogation because their trials served as a key justification for establishing the purity-of-blood statute in the cathedral chapter.Footnote ⁸⁰

After an examination of eighteen witnesses, the 1625 investigation identified up to fifteen sambenitos bearing importance to the case. In addition to the six sambenitos that had played a role in the previous inspection, six sambenitos of individuals presumed to be Rubio de Herrera's relatives and three sambenitos of past members of Córdoba's cathedral chapter were identified. The judges then conducted another inspection by eyesight to verify their existence and location and ordered Agustín de Borja to prepare a new set of pictorial copies (fig. 12).Footnote ⁸¹ In part, the new copies were meant to certify and correct, if needed, the previous copies of the sambenitos. The phrasing implies that Rubio de Herrera's lawyer concentrated on these copies in his contestation of the evidence presented by the judges. The careful certification of each copy indicates that the cathedral chapter's legal representative took care to follow procedure meticulously. Once again, Rubio de Herrera's legal representative was summoned to be present at the inspection, but, once more, he failed to attend. On this occasion, his evasive strategy proved ineffective and the judges ruled against Rubio de Herrera. His tainted lineage, it was decided, denied him the possibility of admission to the cathedral chapter.

Figure 12. Agustín de Borja. Sambenito of Isabel de Herrera (sentenced in 1504), 1625. Archivo Capitular de la Catedral, Córdoba, 5578, cuadernillo 4, fol. 182^r.

Rubio de Herrera's case is arguably unique in terms of the visual documentation it left, but it is not singular. Numerous purity-of-blood investigations made recourse to sambenitos as a form of evidence, often with perilous consequences for those seeking certain posts and admission into exclusive corporations.Footnote ⁸² The sambenito's function as an archive of sorts is also evidenced by the fact that Inquisitors often surveyed the extant sambenitos hung in local churches and compiled extensive inventories.Footnote ⁸³ During this process, they sought to corroborate the evidentiary status of the sambenitos on display by comparing them to available judicial proceedings and testing them against local oral memory. All this was done in an attempt to ensure that people of tainted lineage did not enjoy privileges that were forbidden to them, as in the case of Rubio de Herrera. Yet even if the display of sambenitos had the power to shape popular opinion and to serve as a sort of documentary register for purity-of-blood investigations, this visual archive of infamy also had its limitations. For instance, in 1580, Hernando de Robles, an oidor of the Royal Audience and a consultor of the Mexican Inquisition—the latter being a position that required purity of blood—was found to have ancestors in Spain who had been convicted of Judaizing in 1484. The evidence was a sambenito of a family relative hung above the pulpit in the parish church of Alcázar de San Juan (Ciudad Real, Spain). This caused him to lose his post as consultor to the Inquisition but not his post as oidor, which did not depend on a proof of purity.Footnote ⁸⁴ Indeed, sambenitos may have had a powerful effect on positions requiring purity of blood, but their legal scope was restricted.Footnote ⁸⁵ Distance seems to have been a particularly important factor in limiting the influence of sambenitos. As a matter of fact, despite his rejection from the cathedral chapter, Rubio de Herrera continued to present himself as medio racionero of the cathedral of Córdoba in Rome until his death in 1641. His tomb, in the church of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli, left a lasting testimony to his years of service to the Spanish Crown and described him as a “cordvbensis ecclesiae semi portion” (“medio racionero of the church of Córdoba”).Footnote ⁸⁶ Thus, despite having the position denied to him in Córdoba, in Rome he could claim that this status had been granted to him, which was perhaps thanks to the papal bull he had received.

In addition to the question of sambenitos’ sphere of influence, there were more practical limitations to their function as an archive of infamy. In Seville, as part of an inquiry into a person seeking admission as a knight to the Order of Calatrava, a delegation of judges spent days searching for a particular sambenito among the thousands on display. Their efforts were in vain. The reason for their failure was that the sambenitos were placed in a poorly lit nave and, even by torchlight, could not be read clearly.Footnote ⁸⁷ Likewise, in Corella and Tudela in 1641, the Royal Court of Navarra conducted ocular examinations of a series of sambenitos and a manta, a cloth sheet listing the names of individuals convicted by the Inquisition. Once more, these inspections failed due to the inscriptions being illegible, as they had worn away and were encrusted with dust.Footnote ⁸⁸ The material state of preservation and the lighting conditions were thus essential for the proper functioning of this visual archive.

To serve their purpose, sambenitos needed to be visible. If they were relocated, covered, or damaged, the defamatory memory they conserved would vanish from public sight. In addition to being materially fragile and vulnerable on account of their public display, sambenitos were at constant risk of theft and vandalism. The functioning of the sambenitos as an archive therefore necessitated continuous vigilance. Inquisitorial legal manuals prohibited the removal of sambenitos, declaring that those who stole them from churches were to be punished, usually with flogging and exile.Footnote ⁸⁹ Edicts of Faith published in Spain and Spanish America invited individuals to denounce those “who removed, or made others remove,” sambenitos displayed by the Holy Office.Footnote ⁹⁰ Of course, the need for such inquisitorial norms in the first place points to a significant amount of resistance to the display of sambenitos among members of the public.

Resistance varied in motive and form. In contrast to the established procedures through which individuals could have their penalty of wearing the sambenito commuted, usually in exchange for money or penance, there was no official mechanism for having a sambenito removed from church walls.Footnote ⁹¹ It is important to note that this topic—and, more generally, discrimination on the basis of lineage and past infamy—was subject to a heated debate within Iberian societies. For example, the Dominican friar Agustín Salucio, one of the foremost critics of purity-of-blood statutes, argued in 1599 that exclusionary measures against people of tainted lineages were harmful to Spanish society and should be amended and reduced. As part of this program, old sambenitos were not to be renovated after one hundred or two hundred years, as “our Lord does not want our punishments to be infinite.”Footnote ⁹² Such calls for reform, however, did not lead to any official change of policy until the late eighteenth century. Before that date, the only legal option available to an individual wishing to remove a displayed sambenito was the submission of a special petition to the authorities. On occasion, such petitions were submitted in the name of an entire community wishing to clear its reputation. In late sixteenth-century Logroño, petitions made by the city led the local Inquisition tribunal to relocate the sambenitos of foreigners (forasteros) and to add inscriptions highlighting that they belonged to outsiders, thereby diminishing any taint on the city.Footnote ⁹³ Similarly, after several petitions made by Castilian communities in the early seventeenth century, sambenitos belonging to Portuguese immigrants were marked with inscriptions that specified these individuals’ foreign origins.Footnote ⁹⁴ In both cases, even though a complete removal was not achieved, the Suprema recognized the harm done to the communities’ reputations and implemented measures to distinguish between local and foreign infamy.

Of course, not every petition persuaded the Suprema to eliminate communal infamy. In 1555, residents of Fregenal (Extremadura)—a town in which many inhabitants were descendants of converts from Judaism—issued petitions against the Inquisition's plan to restore and replace the many missing sambenitos in a local church. In the end, their petitions failed to prevent the display of past convictions.Footnote ⁹⁵ In other cases, petitions met with official refusal but still achieved partial success on account of pragmatic solutions. In the late sixteenth century, after a feud between local elites in Murcia and Lorca triggered numerous trials and punishments by the Inquisition, the families involved petitioned the inquisitorial authorities to clear their names from infamy. When they learned their petition had failed, they suggested hanging the sambenitos of their kin without the inscriptions of names. The Suprema refused to grant an exception, but the local tribunal found a solution: the sambenitos would be displayed on a little-visible wall, which kept them in compliance with the law while also satisfying the petitioners’ desire to minimize their infamy.Footnote ⁹⁶ It is important to stress, however, that the Suprema did not change its position—official permission to remove sambenitos was seldom granted.

Given the difficulty of obtaining official permission to remove displayed sambenitos, communities and individuals often chose to take matters into their own hands and defy the law. In Sicily, for example, popular riots in 1516 targeted sambenitos as an emblem of Spanish foreign rule. According to extant sources, from that moment onward, the Spanish Inquisition did not display sambenitos in churches across the island.Footnote ⁹⁷ Such collective action, however, was rare. The removal of sambenitos was much more common in cases of individuals or families taking action against the consequences of infamy. The tribunal of Cuenca, for example, tried several individuals for removing sambenitos from a church and throwing them into a water wheel in 1559. In 1565, a man was tried for removing a sambenito and changing the name inscribed on it, as was another man, in 1575, for changing the location of his grandfather's sambenito; a sacristan, in 1626, for the theft of sambenitos from a church; and a woman, in 1632, for removing a sambenito from its designated display.Footnote ⁹⁸ Such cases abound across the Iberian world.

Sambenitos were usually removed or damaged in attempts to clear an individual's or community's reputation, or to ensure the privileges granted to those considered to have pure blood. A case in Tui may be considered paradigmatic. In 1763, members of the cathedral chapter of Tui made a report to the tribunal of Santiago de Compostela that two sambenitos were missing from the cathedral. The investigation report indicates that the robbery had been prompted by an Old Christian family's opposition to the woman their son wished to marry, due to rumors that her family was of Jewish origin. The son's family had entered the church to copy the inscriptions of the sambenitos belonging to Antonia Saravia and Antonia Henriquez, who were supposedly connected to the woman's family and who thus provided evidence of her tainted status. Three days later, the sambenitos were stolen, leaving only a wooden frame with a “piece of cloth with no inscriptions whatsoever.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The robbery was clearly intended to erase the evidence of a tainted lineage and to pave the way to a marriage free from infamy.

The theft of the sambenitos in Tui failed to achieve its aim: the sambenitos were eventually replaced and their substitutes can still be viewed today (fig. 6). The church and the Inquisition thus managed to preserve the hereditary infamy of the local residents. Nevertheless, it is clear that sambenitos could become focal points in struggles between authorities and members of local communities. This is also evident in the cases of individuals who illicitly appropriated the form of the sambenito in order to shame their enemies. In the later sixteenth century, the Mexican Inquisition dealt with a series of cases concerning the display of makeshift sambenitos on church doors, church towers, and crosses in Tecamachalco and Guanajuato.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Here, sambenitos were weaponized in local struggles over reputation. Individuals and families not only tried to remove or damage sambenitos to erase the burden of infamy; they also sought to denigrate their enemies’ reputations through the production of false sambenitos. Displayed sambenitos thus served as a potent visual archive for societies in which honor and position depended on public reputation and purity of lineage. Yet the sambenitos’ accessibility, materiality, and connectedness to particular locations meant that this archive was also manipulable, vulnerable, and limited.

BETWEEN PURITY AND POLLUTION

In the early modern period, sambenitos were a quotidian sight, filling sacred space with images of infamy. One eighteenth-century French traveler wrote that instead of seeing paintings of “St Mary Magdalene, St Teresa or the Wedding of Cana” on high altars, “you see a pyre, you see a young girl, a child, an old man who dies in the flames.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

The dreadful sight of sambenitos within sacred spaces was disconcerting not only to the enlightened minds of foreigners but also to those of Iberian clergymen, who argued that they were unsuitable objects for church interiors. Such clerical concerns were underpinned by competing visions of how sacred space should be configured, as well as by conflicting ideas about how, where, and to what extent the memory of heresy should be maintained.

The contested place of the sambenito within sacred space was at least in part a consequence of its ambivalent status. While the Inquisition gave general indications about the types of churches in which sambenitos were to be placed—that is, the parish church attended by the condemned or the main church of the city in which they resided—it did not issue any instructions about where they should be displayed within the buildings themselves. In practice, sambenitos were often placed in cloisters and spaces near church entrances—places that churchgoers passed through constantly. Setting aside reasons of practicality, these locations reveal the perception of sambenitos as liminal objects, neither profane nor strictly sacred, and evidently not entirely fit for display in the holiest areas of the house of God.Footnote ¹⁰² Similarly, panels displaying the names of the excommunicated were hung on church doors; it is thus possible to see these intermediary locations as defining the boundaries of the Catholic community.Footnote ¹⁰³ Another element of the sambenito's ambiguity is the fact that, despite being an inquisitorial artifact par excellence, it was not meant to be displayed in the Inquisition's buildings but, instead, in churches and convents. To some extent, the display of sambenitos created enclaves of inquisitorial jurisdiction within spaces ruled by other ecclesiastical authorities, an overlap that gave rise to tensions. In a sense, the practice of displaying sambenitos could be seen to rest on a contradiction. As inquisitorial artifacts, they were publicized in an attempt to purify Iberian societies from heresy, which indicates a function as symbols of orthodoxy. At the same time, their presence in churches and monasteries tarnished the reputations of local communities by linking them with infamy. In this sense, they were pollutants that did not belong in the sacred space.

The stakes involved in the question of whether or not sambenitos should be displayed within a Catholic sacred space are demonstrated by the conflict between church and Inquisition in the cathedral of Granada.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This lengthy process of resistance and negotiation began shortly before Easter 1582, when the Inquisition of Granada made the unusual decision to move the sambenitos on display in the old cathedral to the main chapel of the new cathedral, which had been designed by the architect Diego de Siloé (ca. 1490–1563) and was still under construction. The new main chapel had white walls and numerous openings for stained-glass windows. It thereby offered a much greater degree of visibility than the old cathedral, which had formerly been a mosque, and was filled with rows of columns. Moreover, displaying the sambenitos in the cathedral's holiest space made a clear statement about the Inquisition's authoritative role in the religious community. These evident advantages notwithstanding, main chapels were an extremely rare choice for hanging sambenitos.

The church of Granada immediately contested the Inquisition's relocation of the sambenitos. The long dispute that ensued, first led by the cathedral chapter, later by Archbishop Pedro de Castro (r. 1589–1610), and brought to a close by Inquisitor General Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas (r. 1608–18), shows how the conspicuous exhibition of sambenitos in the cathedral disturbed both clergy and community. A myriad of letters and two diagrammatic drawings unpack the church's main argument: the presence of sambenitos disrupted the divine cult. A critical cause of concern was the unsought reactions of the faithful. The cathedral chapter complained that since the relocation there were people in the church inspecting the names of the heretics at all hours of the day. Even more troubling was the fact that, because of the sambenitos’ location on the walls near the high altar, people had to turn their backs to the Eucharist in order to be able to observe them.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Popular fascination with this record of infamy appeared to overcome the appeal of the holy.

It was the sambenitos’ impact on the liturgy that most troubled the church of Granada. The cathedral chapter issued a memorandum to the Inquisition in which it complained about the proximity of the sambenitos to the altar, which distracted even the priest officiating the mass.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Two drawings were produced to support the clergy's complaints.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The first is an architectural plan of the main chapel with a red line indicating the sambenitos’ locations (fig. 13). The second is a freehand pen-and-wash drawing that includes handwritten observations about the sambenitos’ visibility from the altar (fig. 14). One of these inscriptions states that “the edge of the canvas” of one set of sambenitos can be seen from the high altar, while another specifies that a second set “can be seen from the altar, although it is far.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In addition to disturbing the priest's sight, the obligation of perpetually exhibiting sambenitos restricted the display of tapestries and other adornments during religious celebrations. Instead of commemorating the Catholic Monarchs and the saints with tapestries, the clergy decried, the cathedral now housed the “memory of the heretics.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Figure 13. Plan of the Cathedral of Granada, ca. 1582. © British Library Board, Egerton 1509, fol. 343^r.

Figure 14. Plan of the Cathedral of Granada, ca. 1582. © British Library Board, Egerton 1509, fol. 342^r.

The Inquisition's interest in ensuring the sambenitos’ visibility was evidently at odds with the liturgical and devotional duties of the cathedral of Granada. What began as a disagreement evolved into a deadlock as both the Inquisition and the church refused to cede. The conflict came to a head in 1594, when Archbishop Castro decided to bypass the Inquisition and submit a complaint directly to Philip II, who in turn forwarded it to the Council of Castile.Footnote ¹¹⁰ As part of the official investigation into the issue, Juan de la Vega, the aparejador (master builder) of the royal palace of the Alhambra, sent a report to the president of the Council of Castile in April 1594. This report listed the advantages and inconveniences of displaying sambenitos near the high altar as well as in other alternative locations within the new and old cathedrals. It was accompanied by a plan of the building with a small freehand elevation view of one of the arches in the ambulatory. Both drawings were marked with letters signaling possible locations for the sambenitos (fig. 15).Footnote ¹¹¹ While Vega concurred with the church of Granada that the sambenitos should be removed from the high altar and its surroundings, his arguments differed from those presented by the clergy. Instead of focusing on liturgical matters, he concentrated on aesthetic questions. He claimed, for instance, that moving the sambenitos to the ambulatory would only worsen the problem, as the sambenitos would be even more visible, making this “beautiful building” look “even uglier than it is now.” Vega was particularly worried that, if moved, the sambenitos would cover the statues of saints and the columns, the latter being “the main parts and the beauty of all the building.” He also raised some more practical objections. Hanging the sambenitos above chapel entrances, Vega argued, would bestow infamy upon the chapels, and no one would wish to purchase them.Footnote ¹¹²

Figure 15. Juan de la Vega. Plan of the Cathedral of Granada, 1594. Instituto Valencia de Don Juan, Madrid.

In the end, Vega's expert opinion had little impact. On 22 May 1594, Philip II rejected all the proposed locations for the sambenitos and instead dictated another one. The sambenitos were to be removed from the main chapel and placed in the cloisters of the new cathedral, a more conventional location that underlined their liminal status between sacred and profane. Until the cloisters were ready, the sambenitos were to be housed once more in the old cathedral.Footnote ¹¹³ However, Philip II's ruling was never enforced, partly because of delays in the construction of the cloisters (which were never built), but also due to internal debates between the Inquisition and the Granada church.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Like a stubborn stain that withstands any attempt at removal, the sambenitos remained in situ and kept diffusing the memory of infamy into the sacred space.

The final phase in the negotiations over the sambenitos held by the cathedral of Granada took place almost two decades later, within the context of a wider debate about the Moriscos (Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity between 1502 and 1526, and their descendants). In the years preceding the expulsion of the Moriscos (1609–14), secular and ecclesiastical authorities discussed how best to deal with this large population, which was generally viewed as unchristian and potentially dangerous. Among those who favored further efforts to convert the Moriscos, there were calls for reducing the number of, or completely abolishing, sambenitos, as they were deemed an obstacle to assimilation.Footnote ¹¹⁵ After the expulsion, the debate about the Morisco sambenitos took a different turn. In much the same way that the Spanish communities discussed above sought to eliminate the display of sambenitos of foreigners, individuals began to question the necessity of exhibiting sambenitos corresponding to a group that was no longer present in Spain. This debate was relevant in Granada, where a large Morisco population had lived, and many sambenitos of Morisco convicts were still prominently exhibited in the cathedral.

In response to the growing concern over the display of non residents’ sambenitos, the new Inquisitor General Sandoval y Rojas promoted a program of reorganization and renovation that included the removal of the sambenitos from the main chapel of the cathedral of Granada. As a first step, Sandoval ordered the hanging of all sambenitos that had not been hung in the cathedral since the beginning of the debate, in 1582. Regarding the Morisco sambenitos, his view was that they should be displayed separately in a diminished form.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Suprema first proposed replacing them with a panel stating the number of convicts and explaining that the sambenitos of those expelled from Spain had been removed.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Following objections made by the Inquisition of Granada, however, the Suprema decided to continue the display of the sambenitos of the Moriscos and only use the signboard to list the convicts whose sambenitos were yet to hang.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In this context of compromise and rearrangement, Sandoval also ordered that all sambenitos—Morisco or otherwise—were to be transferred from the cathedral's main chapel to the parish church of Santiago, located near the Inquisition headquarters in Granada.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This solution brought an end to the long debate and paved the way for a redefinition of sacred space in the cathedral of Granada. Soon after, in June 1611, Castro—by then Archbishop of Seville—wrote to Sandoval and thanked him passionately for “restoring [the cathedral's] ancient beauty and radiance,” as well as “for turning that synagogue into a sacred temple” once again.Footnote ¹²⁰

What emerges from the letters and reports associated with the dispute in Granada is the view that sambenitos did not belong in the main chapel of a cathedral, as they were objects that polluted sacred space and blemished the reputation of the local Catholic community. Such a notion was not rare among members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.Footnote ¹²¹ The conspicuous sight of rows of deteriorating sambenitos inscribed with the names and effigies of the heretics visually competed with the sensory experience of the holy, thereby disturbing the liturgy and distracting the faithful. The debate in Granada reveals the potential for jurisdictional tensions between Inquisition and church over who had the authority to define sacred space. Such tensions, however, had to await the end of the Old Regime in order to be finally resolved.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE SAMBENITO

The sambenito and the system of infamy of which it was both a symbol and an agent began to fade in a drawn-out process that involved material degradation, institutional atrophy, and increasing resistance from below. Already in the mid-sixteenth century, the Iberian Inquisitions expressed concern over possible negligence when it came to hanging new sambenitos and renewing those that had deteriorated. The Portuguese Regulations of 1552 and the Spanish Instructions of 1561 both specified that attending to the state of the sambenitos was a key responsibility of Inquisitors when conducting district visitations. Once every several years, writs ordering the maintenance of displayed sambenitos were sent to the tribunals, sometimes following disclosures that they had not been hung in the churches “with the necessary care and punctuality.”Footnote ¹²² Spanish visitation instructions stated that any delay in exhibiting sambenitos was a “major hindrance”—not only because it delayed the administration of justice but also because the task of hanging the ever-increasing number of sambenitos could very easily become overwhelming.Footnote ¹²³ In practice, however, official prescriptions were often not followed. Despite orders in the Portuguese Regulations of 1640, for instance, that sambenitos had to be displayed not only in the parish church of the condemned individual but also in a church of the city where they had been sentenced, a Portuguese Jesuit wrote one year later that this practice had been abandoned, and that sambenitos were only displayed in Lisbon, Évora, and Coimbra.Footnote ¹²⁴ In other words, the Portuguese Inquisition implicitly conceded that the regulations would not be enforced away from its centers of power and kept the practice only in the cities where the tribunals were located. In many places across the vast geography of the Iberian world, institutional constraints and downright negligence diminished the presence of sambenitos.

The decline of the sambenitos gained significant momentum during the eighteenth century. In Spain, Portugal, and their respective empires, reforms put some constraints on inquisitorial power and caused public autos de fe to become rarer.Footnote ¹²⁵ The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) was a further factor, as many buildings were demolished, including churches adorned with sambenitos. A French traveler who visited the Dominican convent in Barcelona reported seeing a sign indicating that many of the sambenitos previously displayed in the church had been destroyed during the siege of 1713, when the convent was heavily bombarded.Footnote ¹²⁶ There was also an increasing laxity toward displaying sambenitos that had survived the destruction of war. Cases of clergymen who independently decided to remove sambenitos from local churches multiplied. These clergymen often claimed their actions were related to church renovation projects, but evidence suggests they were also motivated by attempts to prevent local discord.Footnote ¹²⁷ The inquisitorial authorities usually obliged these clergymen to rehang the sambenitos, but as the eighteenth century progressed, the tribunals increasingly chose not to hang new ones. The tribunal of Logroño came to this decision in 1719, while similar ones were reached in Zaragoza in 1735, in Barcelona in 1747, in Valencia in 1755, and in Llerena in 1761.Footnote ¹²⁸

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Iberian Inquisitions officially changed their policy concerning the display of sambenitos. The change coincided with the apex of reforms targeting purity-of-blood distinctions in Spain and in Portugal. Portugal took a more radical approach. Reformists such as Father Luis António Verney (1713–92) pointed out that sambenitos displayed in churches were an “eternal monument of dishonor to our nation.”Footnote ¹²⁹ The Marquis de Pombal, who was the intended audience of those words, became the driving force behind abolishing the distinction between Old and New Christians in Portugal in 1773. A year later, Inquisitor General Nuno da Cunha decreed that no sambenitos of relajados should be hung in churches, since “the purity of our religion does not suffer images, or panels, to be placed in sacred spaces other than those to whom worship is due.”Footnote ¹³⁰ As demonstrated by the case of Granada, the view that sambenitos polluted sacred space had also been expressed in Spain. Yet the removal of sambenitos was slower there than it was in Portugal. Around 1772, the Spanish Suprema began instructing some tribunals not to restore degraded sambenitos, which constituted an unofficial change in policy.Footnote ¹³¹ However, it was one case in particular, along with the subsequent chain of events, that led to a broader change in Spain's relationship with sambenitos. In 1782, Charles III of Spain decreed that the chuetas, the descendants of Mallorcan Jews forcibly converted to Christianity in 1435, were not to be mistreated and that measures should be taken to make them fully equal citizens.Footnote ¹³² The chuetas, reacting to the king's decree, petitioned for the removal of sambenitos displayed in the Dominican convent in Palma de Mallorca. In response, the king gave orders to establish a special junta to examine and propose “the prudent way” to erase these “memories of defamation and anxiety.”Footnote ¹³³ The junta proposed to remove the sambenitos discreetly under the pretext of whitewashing the walls of the church, and then to burn them in secret. However, due to local resistance in Mallorca, the proposition was never carried out.

Not discouraged, the chuetas petitioned the king once again in 1788. This time, the Inquisitor General decided to submit a questionnaire to all peninsular tribunals, in addition to those of Mallorca and the Canary Islands, concerning the most prudent manner to “erase and undo” the sambenitos that were still on display in churches.Footnote ¹³⁴ The responses to this questionnaire revealed that many of the tribunals had already stopped hanging new sambenitos, and that a significant number of them thought it was better not to continue exhibiting old sambenitos. The report from the tribunal of Toledo specifically stated that sambenitos served no good purpose and that the descendants of Jews should not be discriminated against when it came to allocating offices and honors.Footnote ¹³⁵ Importantly, even among the tribunals that advocated for maintaining the practice of displaying sambenitos, many proposed to slowly do away with them in order to diminish the harms of infamy.Footnote ¹³⁶ Despite this general desire to resolve once and for all the concerns raised by the sambenitos, which were now deemed an impediment to a monarchy under reform, local resistance hindered their total removal.Footnote ¹³⁷ In Mallorca, the sambenitos that triggered the general inquiry continued to be displayed, provoking local discontent. In the early years of the nineteenth century, two chuetas tore them apart after being taunted for their infamous lineage.Footnote ¹³⁸

A series of international conflicts and liberal revolutions during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gave the sambenitos their coup de grâce. During the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and the ensuing Peninsular War (1808–14), many inquisitorial buildings and churches were damaged or completely demolished, taking with them, in all likelihood, numerous sambenitos.Footnote ¹³⁹ In 1808, under Napoleonic rule, the Inquisition was abolished. In Cádiz, where the Spanish government-in-exile was situated, debates about the Inquisition, including discussions about the sambenitos, were key in the larger political conversation that would eventually lead to the Constitution of 1812. One of the prominent voices against the Holy Office, Antoni Puigblanch, wrote, for example, that while many places had long since stopped hanging sambenitos, there were many “placards” still on display, and these caused “disturbances” to families whose surnames appeared in them, including those who did not descend from Jews and were worthy of respect. For that reason, he demanded that these “registers of infamy, which more dishonor the temples whose walls they cover, than the condemned whose names they display” be definitively “removed from the sight of the people.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰

After numerous debates, the Cortes of Cádiz (1810–14) finally reached a conclusion on the matter.Footnote ¹⁴¹ On 22 February 1813, they issued a general decree declaring the Inquisition to be incompatible with the Spanish constitution. Citing article 305, according to which no punishment can be transferred from a criminal to their family, the Cortes highlighted the problems caused by the public preservation of sambenitos, which “bring infamy” to families and even expose people with the same surname to “bad reputation.” For that reason, they decreed that all “pictures, paintings or inscriptions” that provide details of punishments imposed by the Inquisition should be effaced or removed and destroyed within three days after receipt of the decree.Footnote ¹⁴² In some places, the decree had an almost immediate effect. The cathedral chapter of Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands, for example, received news of the decree on 31 March 1813, and decided to enact it on April 3. On the same day, the chapter reported back to Spain that it had burned all the remaining sambenitos, congratulating the Cortes for their “religious zeal in removing this stain from the Church of Jesus Christ.”Footnote ¹⁴³ But before long, the table was turned and monarchy was restored under Ferdinand VII. Ferdinand revoked the decision to abolish the Inquisition, and the Holy Office was reinstated in 1814. As a result, sambenitos began to reappear in some churches, yet on a much smaller scale. The debate about the Inquisition was still a focus for the struggles between liberals and absolutists in the Iberian world, especially in Spain, where during the Liberal Revolution of 1820 Inquisition buildings and symbols, including sambenitos, were attacked. These events brought a conclusive end to the display of sambenitos bearing the surnames of the chuetas in Mallorca.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In the wake of the so-called Liberal Triennium, the Spanish Inquisition was officially restored, but it was by then already moribund, and the sambenitos had completely disappeared from churches. With the definitive abolition of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1821 and the Spanish Inquisition in 1834, sambenitos become obsolete.